I've found a very nice social sharing plugin (WPSocialite) for WordPress that does soft loading of images... on another website that we tested it on we found that soft loading of images for social networks decreased the page load time by 30%+.

However, what we'd like to do is implement it the same way that TechCrunch.com does on their blog home page... off to the left of the post. It looks like they've set it up with divs, but I'm honestly not sure.

The plugin provides a "manual" method to place the social links where ever you want as follows:

Adding php scripts to a page can cause problems, however, there's another plugin called Shortcode Exec PHP which converts your PHP tag to a shortcode that you name. Then, all you need to do is embed the shortcode, as you would with other plugins.

I had seen that short code and thought about using it for this very issue. However, I still can only get it to display on the blog post itself, not the excerpt and not to the left but only to the right of featured image.